The Daily - The Ad Campaign

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

By the time it’s over, this year’s race for president will have cost at least $3.5 billion. The single biggest expense will be campaign ads.Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The Times, discusses the story that each campaign has been using those ads to tell, 30 seconds at a time.Guest: Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Donald J. Trump and the Republicans have bet big on anti-trans ads across the country.The Harris campaign’s recent Spanish-language advertising has highlighted an insult toward Puerto Rico at Mr. Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden.Both parties are running ads that tell voters it’s OK to switch sides. “You can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know,” one says.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. By the time it's over, this year's race for president will cost at least $3.5 billion. Of that, the single biggest expense will be campaign ads. Today, Shane Goldmacher on the story that both campaigns have been telling 30 seconds at a time through those ads. It's Monday, November 4th. Shane? Hello?

Hello. It's really nice to have you in a room, uncluttered. By others. By others. Fantastic. From the roundtable. I By others. By others. Fantastic. From the round table. I'm glad to be here. Yeah.

And of course, I'm teasing the round tables were great. This episode, just FYI, is running on the day before the election. And for a very long time, we have wanted to tell the story of this campaign through advertisements that both campaigns have relied on to try to win over voters. And it feels kind of fitting that we're going to do that in the last 48 hours of the race when everyone who has a TV, especially in a swing state, is being flooded with TV ads. In your mind, what has been the story of advertising in this race?

I think the story of advertising has chiefly been about television advertising. Still. Still. So you might think in this social media era of Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and all of these other platforms that that would be the dominant way that the campaigns are spending the money, but it's not. It's still on those 30-second television ads. And if you look here, in the last days, the campaign actually hit a milestone according

to Ad Impact, whose data we use to track the television spending, which is there's been a billion dollars of television ads just since Kamala Harris entered this race in July. Wow. A billion dollars since July just on old antiquated television advertising. Yeah, and so if you want to tell the story of the 2024 race between these two campaigns, I really think there's nowhere better to look than the stories they've been telling on television.

Well, I wonder if you can just explain why television, I mean, not to sound like I don't appreciate the medium, but we do tend to think of it as something that's increasingly obsolete in an era of cord cutting. Why is television still the preferred medium for these two campaigns, given all the theoretical options? The first answer is that it works, right?

That there's a massive amount of testing on both sides on what can you do to move people emotionally and it's this combination of images and words and sounds and feelings that you can evoke in just a short time, presented to people where they often can't look away. You have to watch it as you're watching football. This live television has become especially important. That's one reason. The other is this is an opportunity for the campaigns to present their vision to voters in a real distilled

version. There's no interference from the media. There's no interference for even the influencer that you're trying to have your message framed by. No pesky fact checking. No pesky fact checking. You can put something that's not quite exactly true on the screen and you are still able to deliver that message to people at volume.

Shane, with all that in mind, tell us the story of how these two candidates, Donald Trump, Kamal Harris, have been and no doubt still are in these final hours, using this precious, powerful resource of TV advertising to try to move the electorate. I think it's important to tell that story the same way the two campaigns are, which is over time. So Trump, from the beginning to the end, has mostly been attacking Kamala Harris. But her campaign has a trickier task, which has been to introduce her, and then also to pivot and to attack Donald Trump. And the urgency when she first became a candidate was so intense, right?

Her allies in her campaign, they needed to get up on the airwaves to tell her story. And the first one I think we should talk about begins in early August and runs basically for most of the month through the Democratic Convention. She grew up in a middle-class home. So the ad begins with grainy photos of Kamala Harris's middle-class upbringing. She was the daughter of a working mom, and she worked at McDonald's while she got her degree. And then she appears as an adult

in another middle-class scene with construction workers. Donald Trump has no plan to help the middle class, just more tax cuts for billionaires. And that's juxtaposed with images of Donald Trump surrounded by wealth. Being president is about who you fight for, and she's fighting for people like you. I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message.

Describe what this ad is fundamentally up to for the voters watching it. This ad is trying to begin one of the big contrasts of the entire Harris campaign, which to say that she is from the middle class and therefore for the middle class. Donald Trump is from the billionaire class and therefore for the billionaire class. And this is trying to address a lot of things for her. It's trying to introduce her story, but it's also trying to address one of the chief vulnerabilities that she entered this race with.

Which is? Which is the economy. Voters are unhappy about the state of the economy. And even if this ad is not technically about the economy, it is very much about the economy. It's saying that she understands the economic pinch that you're in and eventually the story they will tell through advertising is that she has plans to help you. There's actually a second introductory ad that I think we should include, which is addressing the other big vulnerability

that she entered this race with, which is immigration. And in short, it's an ad all about how tough she's gonna be on the border. Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime. The ad begins with images of her early roots as a prosecutor, and over and over, she's standing next to other members of law enforcement. It shows the guns that they've confiscated,

the drugs that they've confiscated. And as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking. And then it pivots to what she says she will do as president, which is all about tough, tough, tough. Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris. I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message.

So this ad, as a companion to the ad we just talked about, sort of says, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's from the middle class. But if you care about the border, Kamala Harris is a law and order border person, which of course is no doubt designed to address what happened with Kamala Harris in 2020 when she ran for president. We've talked about this a lot on the show. When she was on stage and said that she would support decriminalizing the border. She's got a complicated history with the subject. I think the words they used in the ad are important.

She was the attorney general of California. But the way they described that job is not that she was a consumer advocate for 40 million Californians or the chief law enforcement officer even. She was a border state prosecutor and she took on drug cartels. Is that accurate? I mean, is that really what her focus was? It was definitely part of her job. It's why they have the images in this ad.

It wasn't the only job she had. It's the part of the job they're choosing to highlight in this important medium of a television ad. OK, so that's how Harris has used TV ads to introduce herself at the beginning of this race when she subs in for Joe Biden. How do her ads change once she's well into the campaign? The next ad is actually from a group that's supporting her. And it does something that they did in a lot of television ads, which is it uses regular

people to attack Donald Trump, usually former Trump supporters, raising questions about why they would consider supporting them again and eventually ending on supporting Kamala Harris. So phase two of the advertising on behalf of Kamala Harris is to move off of mere introduction into frontal assaults on Trump. Frontal assaults on Trump, driving a contrast and using regular people to tell that story. The ad begins with a white woman watching Donald Trump and shaking her head in disgust as Trump speaks to a bunch of rich donors and tells them how much he's going to cut

their taxes. I am not rich as hell. I work hard. I scrape to get by. It then shows that same woman Grocery shopping but Kamala Harris has plans to help us She's gonna crack down on price gouging and cut taxes for working people like me I voted for Donald Trump before but this time I'm voting for Kamala FF pack is responsible for the content of this ad. What's interesting to me about this ad, Shane, is that it's using Trump's own words against

him, right? He's telling rich people, I'm going to give you tax cuts, which I think most people generally find a little off-putting. And it employs this device of the disillusioned Trump voter as a stand-in for the viewer? It's a permission structure for the small sliver of undecided voters who might have voted for Trump before to say, it's okay. There are other people just like you, other people who don't think that Donald Trump is good anymore and that Kamala Harris has an actual plan to help you.

If you talk about that first ad, it showed her in this middle class scenery. This ad started airing in October. The first ads were in August. You have policies that have emerged. You have a story you're telling that she adds specifics to solve the problems in your life. Okay. So that's stage two for Harris. I think that brings us to right now with Harris' advertising.

What ads in your mind capture Kamala Harris' closing argument to voters? To be clear, I don't think there's any one ad that can capture her closing argument. But if we're telling the story of Kamala Harris' ad campaign, you couldn't tell that story without including abortion. This was the central issue in the 2022 midterms where Democrats overperformed in state after state. And it's very much a part of the closing argument she's making now, both on the campaign trail

and in paid television ads. And this ad begins with a close-up of the face of a woman telling a painful story. When I was five, I began getting sexually abused by my stepfather. And he got me pregnant when I was 12. Three lines of white text show up in a row. Donald Trump killed Roe v. Wade. Girls and women all over the country lost the right to choose, even for rape or incest.

64,000 pregnancies from rape have occurred in states with total abortion bans. In Trump did this, women and girls need to have choices. With Kamala Harris, we do. I'm Kamala Harris. The message from the woman on screen, very stark, very simple, is in Trump's America, I would have had to give birth to that baby, that

product of rape and incest. And in Kamala Harris's, I wouldn't have had to. That's exactly right. This is the kind of ad that Democrats think can help turn out voters they need, and women in particular, in droves. And it's not the only ad on abortion. There's a whole series of them. But it is one of the important closing messages the campaign is making.

Shane, to the degree that you can say, based on your reporting, how effective have these ads from Kamala Harris been? You mentioned that she begins the race with vulnerability on the economy and she addresses that in an ad on immigration. She addresses that in an ad and then she sees an opportunity when it comes to abortion. So to the degree that anything here is measurable, what do we know? The ads are designed to do two things, both strengthen your strengths and address your weaknesses.

And we can see in polling that Kamala Harris has pulled better after hundreds of millions of dollars of ads in these battleground states on the economy against Donald Trump on some of those key questions that they are tracking inside the Harris campaign. Not just who do you trust more on the economy, but who do you think cares more about people like me, which is what those middle-class ads are so much about? She has improved and in some cases is ahead of him. —Fascinating. —On these economic measures. —The power of advertising. —The power of advertising.

Immigration has been less of a focus in recent weeks, and she hasn't closed the gap on immigration the same way she has on the economy. And on abortion, Democrats are already ahead. It's a matter of getting people to think about that issue when they go into the voting booth. So to answer your larger question, yes, absolutely, these ads are making a difference. And we know that not just from polling about the economy, but these focus groups that campaigns hold and where voters are repeating back verbatim the same stories that the ads have been telling. Of course, the Harris campaign is only half the ads that

people are seeing. The other side is Trump, and they're telling an entirely different story. Okay, let's do the second half. Can I use the restroom? No. Before we take an ad break, so to speak. Ba dum bum, we'll be right back. Okay, Shane, let's now turn to Donald Trump's ads and the story that he has been telling through those ads. Well, I think it's worth noting that he's not reintroducing himself to the country

after nine years on his third consecutive presidential campaign. Right, no gauzy ads about the young developer brashly making his way through New York. There were zero of that. There were zero of that. Instead, it was all about Kamala Harris and the candidate she replaced, Joe Biden. And the first ad that I think we should look at isn't one that came out right after she entered the race, but I think is one of the more revealing ones about their attempt to tie her to Joe Biden and the economy. Their Bidenomics led to the highest inflation in 40 years.

It begins with an image of Kamala Harris onstage with Joe Biden as he turns looking almost lost. In comes down, unemployment rising, and a recession now headed our way. Images of economic struggles at the gas pump, warnings about a potential recession. Yet Kamala Harris is clueless. We are very proud of Bidenomics.

Bidenomics is clueless. We are very proud of Bidenomics. Bidenomics is working. And it ends with a clip of Kamala Harris herself declaring that Bidenomics is working. Right. This ad is very clearly designed to say at the precise moment that Kamala Harris is taking over for Biden and saying to the world, you've got a new nominee, Democratic Party and America. This ad from Trump says, no, you don't. You have another Joe Biden. Yeah. I think one of the main battlegrounds of this campaign is about who can

better represent change. And this ad is very much about saying Kamala Harris cannot represent change because she represents Joe Biden. And this ad would seem to exploit the reality that even though Kamala Harris, when she takes over for Joe Biden as nominee, is trying to say, I'm my own person and put some distance between herself and Biden, inevitably, you can't really distance yourself from the person you've been vice president to.

It's one of the trickiest parts of this entire campaign for her. How do you run your own distinctive campaign for president with a new agenda when you have been in charge for the last three years? I mean, I think it's worth lingering for a second on why Kamala Harris is a candidate in the first place, which is that Joe Biden became so distrusted, mostly over his age and acuity, but also over his policies, that he was pushed out largely by the Democratic party. And so attaching her to him is a tough thing for her.

Where does the Trump advertising strategy go next in the race? If stage one is saying more of the same, stage two is saying she actually will be different in one important way, which is that she's worse, that she's too liberal. They ran a series of ads on immigration, but eventually they pivoted to a surprising issue. Kamala will give criminal illegal aliens taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries.

Surgery. Which is transgender rights. Every transgender inmate would have access. —They've run tens of millions of dollars of ads, featuring an old clip of Kamala Harris when she was running for president and running to the left in a Democratic primary, talking about her work to expand access to surgery for inmates who say they need that as gender-affirming care. The Trump team has used this clip in numerous ads.

And I think the one that we should talk about is actually almost a meta ad. It's a discussion of the impact of Trump's ads on a person who's been mostly supportive of Kamala Harris, who is Charlamagne the God, the host of the Breakfast Club. Right. And just to set this up, Charlamagne the God, the host of The Breakfast Club. Right, and just to set this up, Charlamagne the God himself has been watching TV during the campaign, watching sporting events, and seeing the original Trump ads criticizing Harris for supporting gender-affirming care for prisoners.

And when he's seeing these ads, he's disappointed by the position that he sees Harris taking. Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners. He's not just disappointed. He says that these ads are breaking through to him. Hell no, I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to that. Because of not just what it's saying,

the unbelievably of it from his perspective, but when he's watching the ads air during a football game. Kamala is for they, them. President Trump is for you. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. In that sense, Shane, this ad is a kind of inversion of what the Harris campaign was doing with that former Trump voter who watches him on video

and is disillusioned by what she sees when he says he's going to give tax breaks to rich people. Here is a Harris supporting celebrity saying he is disillusioned with what she, Harris, has said. It's the same permission structure. For Harris, you have a white lady saying, you know what, maybe I can actually vote for Kamala Harris. And here you have a black man, a prominent black man, questioning if Kamala Harris is too far left for you. And just to say, if your goal is to portray Kamala Harris as overly attuned to liberal values, which is Trump's goal, this seems like a pretty effective ad

and issue to perhaps heroine on. What Trump's advisors and allies say is that this issue of transgender rights works across a swath of demographic groups that they want to win this year. That you see from the use of Charlemagne that it has some resonance with black men, that it codes across the electorate her as too far left, but that it also has a specific appeal to suburban women, to moms whose daughters are playing in sports. They think this is the kind of thing that could also blunt the abortion message that Harris has been using, a counter message for those same

suburban women who have swung toward Democrats and he's hoping don't swing even further. Got it. And Jane, how is Trump closing out his campaign in ads? What are his closing argument ads over the past week or so? Trump is closing this campaign the same way he began, which is talking about Kamala Harris. And the ad that I think is most revealing and most representative uses both some of her words and some real images of the last four years to tell a story. A flood of illegals, skyrocketing prices.

The ad begins with a very dark, grainy set of images, and then it shows... Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the... A clip of Kamala Harris herself on The View when she was asked what she would do differently than Joe Biden. There is not a thing that comes to mind. And that's when the narrator jumps in and says, nothing will change with Kamala. And it talks about weakness and war and more illegal immigration and even more taxes. Right.

And this ad is a total full circle for Trump's advertising, not just because he's focused on Harris, as you said, but because he's once again putting her right back in league with Biden. He started with Biden, he's ending with Biden. And at the core of his campaign is this really old fashioned question in politics, which is, are you better off today than you were four years ago? That's at the center of this. And it's saying you can't be better and she's not going to be better because she is the

same. Given that so much of the Trump advertising has been focused on Harris, I'm curious how you measure the effectiveness of it. I mean, what he's been up to quite clearly is saying Harris is basically Biden. Harris is not change on any of these key issues, whether it's the economy or immigration and Harris is left of left. The left of left is the one that I would start with, which is that if you look in polls, on average voters think that Donald Trump is not too far out of the mainstream ideologically, rather a larger share of voters think that she is out of the mainstream than think that

he is out of the mainstream. Now some of that is where voters might have begun in this race, but he is pushed to exacerbate that with these advertisements. And so these late stage ads, they're also about what are you going to think about when you go into the voting booth? She wants you to think about Trump. She wants you to think about abortion. She wants you to think that she's going to think about you if she's president.

He wants you to think about what you don't like of the last few years, that you are unhappy with the direction of the country, that she can't even articulate how she would be different than Joe Biden. Aaron Powell Based on how much time you spent with all these ads, do you have either a gut or analytical sense of whose ads have been better. And of course, by better, I mean more effective. I'm going to give you a cop out, which is I definitely don't know the answer as to whose ads have been more effective.

It is true that the Democrats have aired more television ads. That's important to know. That in these last weeks, you're seeing record shattering amounts of money going into television ads and there is more overall spending for Harris than for Trump. And we keep talking about television ads, but these are also digital ads that are running on devices. And on that medium, her campaign has been far outstripping the Trump operation on spending, on YouTube and some of those platforms you can see online.

She has run meaningfully more, but I think she had more to do in her advertising campaign. And he's really just focused on her. And in that regard, he definitely had an advantage that he's hoping money's not going to overwhelm. Shane, you and I don't live in a swing state. We live in the non-swing district of Brooklyn, New York. I see you in my neighborhood. And so our TV viewing experience is not representative of what it's like to feel these ads on your TV screen all day long.

If you live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, if you're in one of those states and you watch TV, how many ads are you going to be subjected to today? Endless. I mean, it is back to back to back political advertisements. There are some stations that are running out of space to sell the campaigns. It's so bad in those states that some campaigns, the Harris campaign has been buying national television ads and the Trump team too, in order to buy spots that are unavailable to buy just locally.

If you want to get on that big broadcast, you can't just buy it in the Philly market or the Atlanta market. You have to buy the entire country. So people have seen some of these ads because the economic inefficiencies, like you know what, it's worth it. We want to squeeze one more spot into that show. So those are the ads we're gonna see.

You're gonna see it everywhere. Huh. ["The Last Post"] And then, just like that, right? I mean, this is the weirdest part of campaign seasons. The election happens, and all that advertising goes away, and it's back to ads for Cialis and McDonald's and for card dealerships. Right.

And it happens just like that. Yeah. It's over just like that. Well, Shane. Yeah, it's over just like that. Well Shane, thank you for watching all these ads so we didn't have to. We appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, the final Times-Siena poll found that the presidential race remains stubbornly

deadlocked across the seven swing states likely to determine its outcome. But it showed that late deciding voters are favoring Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by nearly 10 percentage points. The poll showed that Harris is gaining ground in key sunbelt states, including North Carolina and Nevada, but that Trump has erased her small lead in critical rust belt states like Pennsylvania. Meanwhile... Now we got a phony press. We got a lot of crooked people out there.

We're fighting like a son of a gun. We're fighting. They want to... They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing. In their final hours of campaigning, Trump doubled down on his false claims of election fraud, warning his supporters without evidence that Democrats would seek to steal Tuesday's election and claiming that he should have never left the White House after his first term. I shouldn't have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so well.

Harris, for her part, asked Americans to ignore Trump's growing claims of fraud. I would ask, in particular, people who have not yet voted, to not fall for his tactic, which I think includes suggesting to people that if they vote, their vote won't matter. Suggesting to people that somehow the integrity of our voting system is not intact so that they don't vote. During a news conference on Sunday, the vice president said that Trump was cynically seeking to discourage Americans from voting. Everyone must know that their vote is their power to determine the outcome of the election

and their vote will count. It does matter. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderploeg, Mary Wilson, and Will Reed. It was edited by Lexi Diao, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Rowan Numisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderland. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Boborono.

See you tomorrow.